Review/Film; Yes, Boy Meets Girl, But This Time the Girl Wields Sharp Objects

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The mountain climber's school of film making tells us that Mike Myers is now a movie star because he's there. Where he is, precisely, is at the spot where "Saturday Night Live" meets "Wayne's World," a locus that guarantees him the attention of younger audiences regardless of what he does or how funny it happens to be. It comes as a welcome surprise that "So I Married an Axe Murderer," which might have been nothing more than a by-the-numbers star vehicle, surrounds Mr. Myers with amusing cameos and gives him a chance to do more than just coast.

Peering out warily from beneath a boyish hair mass, Mr. Myers plays Charlie Mackenzie, whose two salient traits are wariness about women and strong ties with his Scottish heritage. The latter provides "So I Married an Axe Murderer" with its biggest comic bonanza, since Mr. Myers also appears as his own father, speaking in an unintelligible accent and sometimes wearing kilts. In his paternal role, Mr. Myers has a way of unexpectedly bursting into Rod Stewart songs as he presides over an equally weird family. The wonderful Brenda Fricker adds great spark to these scenes as Charlie's flirty, trivia-mad mother, even though this Oscar-winning Irish actress deserves better American film roles than she seems to be getting.

"So I Married an Axe Murderer," written by Robbie Fox and directed jauntily by Thomas Schlamme, also has fun with the San Francisco coffeehouse setting in which Charlie is first seen, as a neo-Beat poet bewailing his miserable love life. His romantic fortunes seem to improve when he meets Harriet Michaels (Nancy Travis), the beautiful butcher who sells him his haggis. (Mr. Schlamme treats this as the occasion to concoct the kind of "meat cute" montage that could make anyone a vegetarian.)

But Harriet's past history dovetails a little too neatly with that of an infamous ax murderer whose exploits have been lovingly described in The Weekly World News, a publication Charlie's mum refers to devotedly as "the Paper." Naturally, Charlie begins to worry. The idea that Harriet might hack him to bits is a natural extension of his own misgivings. The film's slight but worthwhile bit of realism grows out of Charlie's fears.

In addition to Ms. Travis, who brings a warmly seductive presence to the film's one difficult role, "So I Married an Axe Murderer" also features Anthony LaPaglia as a loyal, very patient pal of Charlie's, and Amanda Plummer as Harriet's sister, in a role the film makers seem barely to have been given five minutes' thought. The film also includes a funny assortment of cameo performers, among them Steven Wright as an alarming pilot, Charles Grodin as an amusingly bad Samaritan and Phil Hartman as an Alcatraz tour guide ("My name is John Johnson, but everyone here calls me Vicki"). Alan Arkin has a delightful turn as a police captain who's a shy sort but doing his best to sound like something off a television show. Unlike the other cameos, Mr. Arkin's really is truly unbilled, which makes it a kind of cameo and a half.

The look of "So I Married an Axe Murderer" is crisply professional, and John Graysmark's production design provides an element of visual surprise. There are surprises on the soundtrack, too, with touches like a Bay City Rollers song to keep the audience wondering what might happen next.

A version of this review appears in print on July 30, 1993, on Page C00003 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Film; Yes, Boy Meets Girl, But This Time the Girl Wields Sharp Objects. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe